NoahFect

If you really want enlightenment, do what I did and create a halfway-attractive female "character" on a site like OKCupid or match.com. The responses you get from men will change your entire perspective.

Not female. I was just in the "dating market" at the time, and decided to check out my competition. I created a female profile that I would have been inclined to email, personally, and sat back to watch the fun. The fun wore off in a hurry. shudder

Specifically, there are large numbers of men who clearly spam every female profile in the site. There are large numbers of men who start planning the wedding with their first, as-yet-unanswered email. The latter group are some seriously sad people. The pathos really got to me after a few of those.

There are small but significant numbers of menu who don't see a difference between match.com and sites like Adult Friend Finder. And then there's another small contingent of men who need a date with Dexter.

The noise floor on a dating site, from a female perspective, is more than enough to swamp email from the normal average Joe. The ultimate lesson, besides the fact that yes, actually, men are asshats, is that you don't want to invest too much time and effort into your initial approach to a woman, because she's probably already been grossed out, freaked out, threatened, or kidnapped (if she wasn't a bot or a shill for the site to begin with). Wait for her to write back after checking out your profile, at least... then you can start to get more personal.

It's hard to exaggerate how hostile that environment is. Probably second only to the surface of the sun, when it comes to places where you wouldn't expect to do any harm by crashing a spacecraft.

It's a rational strategy, too, if you know someone has blackmail material on you. Get out in front of it by making the kompromat sound boring.

The answer, I think, lies in a question: is this punishment for the child's benefit, or the parent's? What happened in your case was clearly not really about you -- it was motivated entirely by your dad's own problems with self-control and anger management. He obviously beat the daylights out of you for his own sake, not for yours.

It may or may not be necessary to swat a child once or twice to keep him/her from doing things like darting into traffic. I don't know; I'm not a parent. But I do know (from being a kid once) that if a parent feels the need to administer corporal punishment to a child who's older than eight or so, the failing is more likely to be the parent's than the child's.

In particular, the act of spanking a teenager would never make sense as an effective or productive punishment. It could only lie somewhere between absurd and horrific.